OpenAI announces Codex, an AI agent for coding

OpenAI has launched a cloud-based software engineering artificial intelligence (AI) agent with coding capabilities. It is called Codex and is available for ChatGPT Pro, Team, and Enterprise users.

Codex, which has been released as a research preview, is capable of performing tasks like code writing, answering questions about a codebase, fixing bugs, and proposing pull requests for review.

The AI ​​agent uses the new Codex-1 model, a modified version of the o3 reasoning model that the company claims is optimized for software engineering.

“It was trained using reinforcement learning on real-world coding tasks in a variety of environments to generate code that closely mirrors human style and PR preferences, adheres precisely to instructions, and can iteratively run tests until it receives a passing result,” OpenAI writes in a company blog post.

Codex is accessible via OpenAI’s web version. Still, it opens in a sandboxed desktop environment without internet access to make sure the AI agent can solely interact with the users’ code. The agent can’t access external websites, APIs, or other online services.

Users can load their code repositories from GitHub and ask the AI ​​agent questions about the codebase or have it modify the code. Codex offers citations of terminal logs and test outputs so users can trace each step taken during task completion.

It takes up to 30 minutes to complete a task. The tool can execute multiple tasks simultaneously and works in the background. Users can choose whether to integrate the changes in the GitHub repository or a local environment.

At this stage, it remains essential for users to manually review and validate all code that has been generated by the AI agent before integrating and executing it.

OpenAI emphasizes that Codex is still in its early development. Therefore, the AI agent misses some features, like image inputs or the ability to interact with the agent while it’s working on a task. The company expects that Codex will be able to handle more complex tasks soon.

Codex is currently available to ChatGPT Pro, Enterprise, and Team subscriptions. On a later date, the AI agent will also be added to ChatGPT Plus and Education subscribers.